After being threatened and fearing for my life, I've decided to muster up y laziness and throw it out the window to put up another short but hopefully sweet review!! Lets see..which game should I pick today.. I mean theres DOZENS of them but its 5am and I have to up at 8 so I can stay too long, wtf is that sound outside, like a bird DYING but with FORCE! Anyway...

WIZBALL!!

Now I'm going to be super lazy here and cut and paste part of a review of this game in here when I'm done with my memory flashbacks as its been SO long sicne I played it that my descriptions would just suck so much. FIRST off heres some pics!

RIGHTO! This game is BRILLIANT! If you look up at the screens you'll notice a big green ball with a face on and a little green ball near it. You start off as that big green ball without that little one, which is called a cat. This game was brought out by Ocean, or distributed by them or something, cause back then I wasnt too familiar, as an 10 year old or whatever, about which was the developer and publisher. But I loved almost any game that had the OCEAN symbol on it.

So anyway. You play that large green ball. You bounce up and down on the spot. The way to move about is by spinning yourself round and round by holding one way or the other way on the joystick, so depending how fast you were spinning would dictate how far you bounced across the screen. Bouncing too far was dangerous because you could smash into something and die. See in the second screen those weird floating...lego like...DNA strand thingies? When you shoot these things they would drop a drop of liquid, and each one would be a different colour. You used these 'colours' to fill up cauldrons you had at the bottom of the screen, and each colour did something different. You needed to fill up all the cauldrons to complete the stage. Also see those holes in the ground? Those are gateways to the next level of the stage since you had to go back and forth between levels to complete stages.

Now with that smaller green thing called the cat, this is an extra ability. Once you get the right amount cauldrons, if I recall correctly, you could add a power to yourself by shaking the joystick quickly from side to side. Some of these abilities would be fire power, a shield, the ability to actually FLOAT around instead of bounce, which made collecting the drops ALOT easier. The cat is also another ability. If you hold down the firebutton then you can control it and use it to collect drops or smash certain things that are just too dangerous to go near for fear of hitting things around it. It'll die after a little but you can bring it back. The COOL thing about multiplayer is that one of you controls the larger one and the other controls the cat. It was SO much fun to play and I must of completed it over a dozen times.
Ok, heres the bit I'm going to cut and paste cause I'm lazy...

Quote:

Collecting a grey droplet endows the Cat with 128 lives, wheras a black droplet makes the scenery go black - vision is restored by shooting a certain number of aliens. Catching a light blue droplet results in a 'Filth Raid' - sirens balring and blue lights flashing, six ships zoom in for the kill. A carelessly consumed purple droplet drives the cat insane, causing him to zip around the screen, miaowing with rage until he's killed. The white droplet gives an extra life.

The game had alot of depth in it. While the graphics were the greatest around, the game was bloody fun, the music was EXCELLENT, and overall its one game that will always stay in my memories as one of those works of magic.

Ok I'm going to BLESS you lot with a quick second review of another game that holds a spot in my heart. This game is called...

MAD DOCTOR!!

Now think of this as the story of Dr Frankestien. You play the 'mad' doctor. Your sole object is to go around the adjascent villages and morgues and pilfer human parts to create your 'monster'. The whole purpose is to get it to perform on stage and do simple commands. If the monster does as you say then you complete the game! Otherwise it'll go berserk and kill everyone and yourself unless you sedate it.

You start off by going around the town and collecting stuff like needles for sedatives, a kite so you can use to electricute your monster to life, etc. Then the fun part. You can go around and BEAT the crap out of people and then carry them back to your lab. Now this part is a bit tricky. You dont want to beat them up TOO much otherwise their 'parts' become too damaged and this leads to retard monster. So you kill them 'lightly' and get them back to your castle before they regain conciousness. Here you examine each of their parts and decide which parts you want to keep, or if you want to just reject them all and just KILL them and toss their body away somewhere. Also I forgot to mention, walking around at night is also MUCH more safer. And you need to head home to eat now and then or you'll lose health.

You need to be VERY careful noone spots you or the police will come for you and so will other villages and they will beat you to death. So you dumb the body FAR from your castle. The cool thing was watching villagers come over to the body and start to carry it away slowly though to the cemetary, and I'd sit there and think ''aww its the family carrying away their father/daughter/mother/etc, they look so sad, oh theres someone on their own over there....''.

You could do it the safe way and get parts from people already dead, but its hard to find useful parts, and as mentioned before a retarded monster is a bad monster. Apart from butchering people and desecrating graves, you could also pull down the local resident who had been hanged int he town square. Once you put the monster together you zap him with the kite in the fields and then try to teach him commands. You needed to be careful though because there would always be people nearby, so you'd have to take little secret passage ways from your castle to certain areas. Definately helped when you had a throng of villagers CHASING you back towards your castle to KILL you.

I also loved the fact that you had a dungeon in your castle that you could lock people up and watch them come back to reality and just frantically run back and forth inside it. FRESH MEAT! This game was a total gem. First pic is the map screen where you walk between towns, and second is your bedroom in the castle. The graphics werent that special, but unlike today, you never actually cared about graphics since the games were complete magic.

As mentioned already, this game was magic. Must of completed it over a dozen times and more.

As I've said before with all the other games, this one also was BRILLIANT! The whole premise of the game was you were boarding a ship that had all its robots go in rogue crazy mode and you needed to wipe them all out. The actual look of the game was pretty different. Heres a screen!!

What you're seeing there is the layout. DOH! You control your own droid, 001. Each droid has its own power level, and the higher the number of the droid, the more powerful. There were 2 ways of defeating them. One way was to shoot your lasers at them. The other way was to override one of them and take them over so you control a sronger more powerful droid. The way you did this was hold down the fire button till you started to glow and then CHARGED the nearest droid and ram them. Once you did this successfully without getting killed (Best not to go for something TOO Strong compared to you), you would get this screen....

What you're looking at is something pretty fun.You're the white guy on one side, and you fight the one on the other. See how on your side you have 5 little yellow triangles along the side and the enemy has 3? You use these to activate one of the lines on your side. It should look fairly straight forward, you need to get the colours in the middle to match your colours and have more of them to win. You can both fight over the same square, but you will need to time it so yours outlasts the enemies and thereby taking it over. It was very tactical.

If you won you became that droid. If you lost you FRIZZED yourself back to 001, and if you were already 001 you'd just DIE! Alot of the robots had bios you could look up and also different weapons for a select few. Like for example the 999 one had the ability to make the screen FLASH, and any droids around would get obliterated. Problem is it would hurt you aswell, but not as much. You could always regenerate your health by finding little wall connector things where you pressed up against them and you healed.

My favourite droid to get was type 883, the pic below should say it all really.

There were multiple levels on the ship, we're talking near 20 or something, and you could telelport around by going to specific sections of each level where you had a teleporter. The excellent Zzap!! magazine gave this game 97% back in the day. Its an awesome game and very addictive, and for all the times I played this game, I dont actually recall completing it. Was hard! Quick little note. Dont think just because theres droid 001 to 999, that theres almost 1000 droids to kill. They skip HEAPS of numbers and theres alot of doubles around.

Games released in the late 80s and still have a very strong place within my memories. I dont want to say things like these 3 games are above other classics like Chrono Trigger or whatever. But as games go, these 3 rocked my world for MANY years. I played them over a span of 8 years.